AI Article Synopsis

  • Many studies on how people from different cultures understand emotions use a task where they pick the correct emotion from a list.
  • There's a debate about whether this task makes it easier for people to guess correctly, which might make it seem like everyone understands emotions the same way.
  • Research with groups from a small tribe in Tanzania and large cities in China and the U.S. shows that this task can influence how well people do, suggesting that what people pick might not really mean that emotions are universal across cultures.

Article Abstract

The majority of studies designed to assess cross-cultural emotion perception use a choice-from-array task in which participants are presented with brief emotion stories and asked to choose between target and foil cues. This task has been widely criticized, evoking a lively and prolonged debate about whether it inadvertently helps participants to perform better than they otherwise would, resulting in the appearance of universality. In 3 studies, we provide a strong test of the hypothesis that the classic choice-from-array task constitutes a potent source of context that shapes performance. Participants from a remote small-scale (the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania) and 2 urban industrialized (China and the United States) cultural samples selected target vocalizations that were contrived for 6 non-English, nonuniversal emotion categories at levels significantly above chance. In studies of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, above chance performance is interpreted as evidence of universality. These studies support the hypothesis that choice-from-array tasks encourage evidence for cross-cultural emotion perception. We discuss these findings with reference to the history of cross-cultural emotion perception studies, and suggest several processes that may, together, give rise to the appearance of universal emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6535382PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000501DOI Listing

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